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About Me

Roy-Gene Aidan (艾瑞惍) is a writer, social and political progressive, bleeding-heart liberal, unapologetic tree-hugger, nascent world-traveler, former junior high Student Council presidential candidate, occasional hipster, sometime rabble-rouser, recovering cynic, frequent potty-mouth, disaffected country boy, sarcasm and dad-joke aficionado, aspiring coffee and beer connoisseur, and flagrant dreamer—but not in that order—as well as a 2012 graduate of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.In his free time, he enjoys reading, writing, thrift shopping, and admiring the aesthetics of the male posterior. He takes his brews strong, his cocktails only when he has to, and his flannel plaid. There are only two things he truly detests in life: people who are arrogant in their ignorance and dark chocolate… and wearing socks in bed. Okay, so, three things.

He was catechized as “Aidan”—for St. Aidan of Lindisfarne—on July 22, 2012, at Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What that action signifies to him is still a matter of substantial internal debate, but he currently identifies as an agnostic atheist and considers it highly unlikely that any of the known human conceptions of God or divinity are remotely accurate. In February of 2013, he moved to Daegu, South Korea, where he lived for two years as a teacher of English as a second language, a profession he plans to pursue for at least the foreseeable future. Since late March of 2015, he’s lived in Taiwan, first in Douliu City and now in Taipei. He’s interested in the possibility of joining the United States Foreign Service in a few years and hopes to spend his life doing what he can to show the world that America is, in fact, not full of ignorant, culturally-superior, gun-toting, Bible-barfing, self-infatuated fools but that those are just the ones we put on television—or occasionally elect to political office. Ultimately, he just wants to move to the Pacific Northwest, build himself a house out of mud, grow his food in a picturesque little garden, and open a quirky coffee shop/pub that’s really obscure and that you’ve probably never heard of. Finally, because he knows you’re wondering, yes, he did write this himself in the third person while he was slightly tipsy. Deal with it.

About Roygeneable

Hi. I’m Roy-Gene. I write shit.

I started this blog back in early spring of 2011 when I was freshly 21 years old and living in Washington, D.C., and in a very different phase and place in life. Some time before that, when I was creating my Gmail address, I discovered to my crushing dismay that roygene at gmail dot com was already taken (A THOUSAND DEATHS ON YOUR HEAD, VILE SCUM). But, never fear, for Google was there to offer suggestions for an alternate username. Among the predictable suggestions (roygene11941032139, etc.) was one that caught my eye: roygeneable. “How curious!” I said to myself. “I’ve never thought of my name as an adjective.” I immediately felt less bad about not getting my first choice (NEVER MIND, VILE SCUM). The rest, in due course, is history.

As I said, I started this blog when I was in a very different place in life. I was a student at a bizarre Christian university from which I had made a temporary escape at a particularly low point in my college experience. I was a closeted gay Christian who had accepted an internship at a wildly anti-gay hate group in our nation’s capital. I was a fervent believer in God who spent an hour every day in prayer and meditation, mostly asking Him to make me straight. In the years since then, a lot has happened and changed in my life, as you’ve probably guessed by now after reading my bio. In like manner, my blog has changed a lot as well in that time. Some of my posts are better than others and some of the things I’ve written in the past are things that I would now publicly disavow. But, for the most part, I don’t delete them. I’m not in the business of whitewashing history, even my own.

A human life is a complicated trainwreck, full of wild twists and turns and course corrections and more than a few dead ends. Despite our best efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, no one follows a clean, linear, orderly path from the womb to the tomb. It just doesn’t work that way and I see my blog as a means for me to remember where I’m from, where I’ve been, where I thought I would be, and where I want to go. If you find that sort of introspection interesting, then I invite you to explore my posts. Comment on them too, if you wish; I love a good conversation. In any case, this blog primarily exists for the maintenance of my own sanity and also because, for some reason, I just enjoy sharing my thoughts with the world. Thanks for stopping by. Also, I use the Twitter Machine, so you’re welcome to follow me there too if you like. Cheers.

Recent Posts

Today, I went to file my taxes. Not my U.S. federal taxes, mind you, because I’ve never done that before. I’m actually still trying to fill out the various IRS forms I’m required to file so I can submit them for the past three years. You see, it was only in the past year that learned I still have to file U.S. taxes despite my living and working abroad. As a matter of fact, the United States is one of only two countries in the world that taxes its expatriate citizens; the other is the tiny dictatorship of Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Strange bedfellows.

But never mind all that because it’s beside the point. The taxes I filed today were for my home of the past year, Taiwan, known officially as the Republic of China. To do so, I simply walked around the corner from my apartment to my district tax office. I walked in, was handed a number from an attendant, and took a seat. A few minutes later, my number flashed across a screen directing me to counter 9. The tax bureau representative couldn’t speak English, but there was no need for her to. All she needed was the ID number from my alien registration card (ARC), which enabled her to pull up my tax documents from a digital database on her computer, print them out, and then direct me to a computer station to file them.